Tedious tears of a clown

Charles Spencer

12:01AM BST 04 Apr 2005

Charles Spencer reviews The Comedian at Watermill Theatre, Newbury

I was pretty sure I was going to love this play. The beautiful Watermill is one of my favourite theatres, Ade Morris has strong past form as a playwright, and his subject is a veteran stand-up comedian. John Osborne, Trevor Griffiths and Terry Johnson have all proved that comics can make for terrific theatre, offering the opportunity for both jokes and heartache, for the old cliché about the tears of a clown has more than a grain of truth in it. Show me a great stand-up and the chances are I'll show you a chronic depressive.

The Comedian is certainly admirably ambitious. The action ranges back and forth in time, from the mid-1970s to the present day, following the professional and personal life of Jimmy Baker, from his early days in the clubs to the professional success, and private desolation, of his later years.

Along the way we meet his first wife Katherine, who died in a car crash when Jimmy was behind the wheel with too many drinks on board, and his 24-year-old daughter Millie, who bitterly resents her father for causing her mother's death and subsequently neglecting her. Morris also attempts to show how Britain has changed over the past three decades and become a shabbier, greedier place led by increasingly contemptible politicians. Unfortunately, his sense of social history is sketchy and the play's glib, knee-jerk Left-wingery becomes tiresome.

But the real problem with the play, which Morris also directs, is that I never believed in its central character. Under his wife's tutelage, we watch Jimmy becoming politically awakened, so that he evolves into a bizarre hybrid of Les Dawson and Ben Elton in his angry ranting prime.

Unfortunately, what we see of Jimmy Baker's act is so lamentably unfunny - the jokes stale, the political satire blunt, the pathos merely mawkish - that I found it impossible to crack a smile, let alone raise a laugh. The idea that this desperately unfunny funny-man would ever have been a popular success is frankly incredible.

The drama proves as desperate as the jokes. The play meanders along with no discernible sense of structure beyond Morris's annoying habit of the delayed revelation of important biographical details. And the late news that the hard-drinking Jimmy is in fact dying of liver cancer is every bit as emotionally manipulative as it sounds.

Shaun Hennessy powerfully conveys the comic's lugubrious gloom, as he stands huddled up in his overcoat on Brighton pier, swigging from his hip flask. He is far less successful at conveying the ravages of time - the young Jimmy is almost indistinguishable from Jimmy heading towards his grave in alcoholic middle age - and he proves incapable of transforming Morris's leaden jokes into comic gold. But then, that task would have defeated the combined talents of Eric Morecambe, Tommy Cooper and Frankie Howerd.

Morag Cross has the thankless task of playing Jimmy's wife, which requires her to spend most of the time as a ghost, watching the action with a compassionate smile on her face.

And Sarah Niven is so unattractively chippy as the daughter, who believes that kidnapping the cats of politicians is far more effective direct action than telling jokes about them, it was difficult to care about her screwed-up life.

After its brief run at the Watermill, The Comedian is going on a tour of local halls. To adapt a catchphrase from the infinitely funnier Little Britain, I fear it could well prove the only flop in the village.